You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 96. Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with weight for good. Here’s your host, fortune 100 executive, and certified life coach, Shannan Christiansen.

Hello love. I’m always so happy to be back with you. Today we’re going to get into failing ahead of time and, you know, as always it’s going to be a good one. This is something I struggled with for so many years, and it still rears its ugly head with me for sure. So if you are loving the show, please rate and review the show and also make sure you subscribe so I’m on your list every Wednesday morning. I read every single review. I love the reviews. And later on in the episode, I’m going to tell you about how you can be entered into a giveaway.

But first, love, let’s talk about rain. It has been a raining here in Arizona and I have to say it has been nice. Usually rain comes honestly in Arizona and mostly it comes at night for like a couple of hours. We don’t get a ton of rain here obviously, we live in the desert, but every once in a while we’ll get these, I mean really when I say once in a while, I’m like once every couple of years we get these stretches of rain. I have to say it has been amazing. It’s been raining for a day and a half, which is so strange to me.

Like every time, even if it’s light rain. And I know so many of you are all over the country, all over the world and you know, you get lots of rain, but it’s not like that here in Arizona. So I do have to say it’s perfect timing actually, because I feel like I need rest. And I have to say when it is raining, because we’re always sunny here in Arizona, it makes me want to cuddle up with Paul and just rest and binge watch some TV. Ooh, I love it. I really do need to rest. My body has been telling me lately, Shannan, you need to slow it down. We have a lot of things happening right now and my body needs it.

We’re preparing for our member only event in Transform it’s called Unstoppable Live. And honestly, I can’t believe it’s going to be here in less than two weeks as I record this. I get to spend two days with my ladies teaching, coaching, watching breakthroughs. I just cannot wait. These ladies are showing up for themselves. They’ve invested in themselves. They have decided that they’re worth spending two days on themselves.

I mean, these ladies they’re just unstoppable. All my ladies are. And you are too my love. We are approaching our hundredth episode and to celebrate it we’re doing a couple very especial episodes and I’m also doing a giveaway. You know me, I love giveaways. So at the end of this show, I’ll share with you how you can enter the giveaway. Oh, so fun.

So let’s get into today’s topic. Do you find that you put yourself off? Meaning you just go through life, checking things off your to-do list, eating all the things, just living in your automatic brain, mostly on autopilot. This is a very important question to ask because I did this for so long. I mean all my life, seriously.

Losing weight, being fit was on my mind. It was there, even if it was in the back of my mind. I wanted so badly to show up for myself. I tried lots of things, but often I would stay in confusion about it. I would fail ahead of time. See my love failing ahead of time is simply not starting or not going all in on a dream or a goal that you have.

I would tell myself things like, I don’t know how to lose weight. I’ll never lose weight. It’s too hard. This won’t work anyways. These kept me failing ahead of time, where I would not even begin, or I would give a half-hearted try if even that, because I had so much fear of failing, failing in front of others. I didn’t want to be vulnerable.

Put myself out there because what would others think? What shame I would feel if I failed again in front of my family, friends or coworkers. I had failed so many times on so many diets. I had gained and lost hundreds of pounds. And I just got to a point over and over again where I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want the shame of it all.

See, it’s easy to cross the finish line in our minds, to picture ourselves losing weight, showing up for ourselves. We have these fantasies. I had this fantasy in my mind, my whole life of who I would be when I finally lost the weight. We tell ourselves we’re going to do it. And then it gets hard. Or we have to say, I’m not hungry for the cupcake to a family member. And we just give up. We don’t want to do the hard things because we tell ourselves that we can’t. I see this with ladies all the time. They want to show up for themselves. They want to lose weight so badly, but then these thoughts creep in. So they don’t start. They don’t go all in.

They fail ahead of time. They tell themselves that this won’t work. I can’t change my mindset. My thoughts, I can’t do this work. I am so busy. Then they live in this mind H E double hockey sticks of wanting to lose weight so badly and not doing anything about it.

It is such a hard place to be. I lived in this drama in my mind for most of my life, wanting to lose weight and not doing anything about it. See, when you tell yourself I can’t, I don’t know how, it won’t work, you feel frustrated, confused, sad. Then your brain is like, we need a dopamine hit.

I don’t want to feel all this. And you find yourself eating, buffering so you don’t have to feel anymore. So you can go back into autopilot. One of the ways I had to stop failing ahead of time was to get honest with myself. What was really hard about staying in a body that carried extra weight, that I did not want. Honest about how much effort I was really putting into it.

And how often I was just failing ahead of time, not taking any action on my dream of living in a body that I loved that felt like freedom. I was on the diet roller coaster for 38 years almost. I did try all the things, but probably 5 to 10% of that time I was actually doing the work or showing up for myself, taking small steps forward. The other 90 to 95% of the time I was in autopilot, eating all the things, feeling sorry for myself, telling myself that I couldn’t do it. Honestly, just playing in the puddle. When I lost weight for the last time, I just increased that 5 to 10% a little at a time.

I got honest with myself, loved myself through the failures, and learned from them. Kept pulling myself into awareness, out of autopilot. I learned how to show up for me and really understood why I wanted it, why I wanted to live in a body that felt like freedom. When I watch my ladies in Transform, my bosses, I watch them just keep learning and growing. They keep increasing the percentage that they show up for themselves.

They’re getting coached, changing their mindset. They’re changing from the inside out. And it is absolutely an honor to watch it. See just starting to know how you’re failing ahead of time, noticing how you’re not even starting or not going all in, it is the very first step. I want to give all of you ladies who are not in Transform yet, I’ll say yet because I can’t wait till you come in, a few steps. Now, if you’re in Transform, we talk about this. We coach to it. We have tools. We have lots of things on this, but I want to give you ladies who are not yet with me as a client, a few steps to stop setting yourself up for failure.

Number one, bring awareness to it. I love this book, The Big Leap. It’s one of my favorites, by Gay Hendricks. And he always says shine a light on it. So just bringing awareness to what is actually happening, the reality of what is going on. What’s your percentage of time that you’re actually showing up for yourself.

And then number two, take one small step. It could be as simple as listening to this podcast, making a realistic plan, doing some reflection, work, increasing your, you know, sleep or water. You can find all of these episodes in this podcast that will give you all of these kind of some of these tips and tools, but just choose one and take one action forward.

And then number three, love, have a little faith in you. Start to believe and change your thoughts about what is possible for you. That you can figure this out. You are going to. You are figuring this out because love, you figured out so many things. And I have to say I’m so excited because in September in Transform, we are going to, we do book clubs. We do them, oh, I don’t know, three or four times a year, and in September is our next book club. And we’re doing a book by Marie Forleo and it’s called Everything is Figureoutable. And you know, I love this concept, that, and I tell myself this a lot. I can figure it out. Even when my brain is like, you’re failing and it’s not working and all the things, I just know that I have tons of evidence that I can figure it out.

And number four, allow yourself to fail. Allow it to be hard and just take the next best action for you.

So the transformational questions are one, how are you failing ahead of time? And number two, what would change for you if you went all in on you? So good.

And my love, we are doing a big giveaway for our hundredth episode. So when you leave a written review for this podcast on apple or iTunes, you can place yourself into a drawing for a basket of my favorite things. It is going to be stocked full of my favorite things. I’m telling you, you’re going to love it. We will draw on August 26 and I’m going to do the drawing live on Facebook, on my business page BFLY Coaching. So if you don’t have an iPhone, no worries, I have instructions on how to create an apple ID so you can leave a review on iTunes. I want all of you to be able to participate in this. So go to bflycoaching.com/fun100, F U N 1 0 0.

And if you want to learn more about my tools, take my free course. You can go to bflycoaching.com/ready to take it and learn the fundamentals of what I teach, tools that can help you start to lose weight for the very last time. So good my love. Bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and want to learn more, come on over to bflycoaching.com. See you next week.